Singapore's public housing is internationally acclaimed, and many attribute Singapore's economic miracle to our housing policies. However, as Singapore marches on from the effects of COVID-19, there has been rising concerns of rising public housing prices in Singapore. Since the data is publicly available, I wanted to let it speak for itself. Kudos to data.gov.sg and our Housing Development Board ( HDB ) for releasing this data.
I created these charts to track some of these public housing resale trends of the recent past and future. Hopefully these trends will be as interesting to you as well. Best viewed on desktop to see the charts properly.
Searching for public housing resale transactions of the past 6 months? Head to here instead!
Instead of focusing on single metrics like median or mean, I wanted to see public resale price distributions across months. Boxplots adequately show median prices, 25th and 75th percentile, and outliers. Median public home prices have been greater than 500K SGD ( red ) since Oct 2021, while we see more expensive public resale flats during this same period. Do we still have affordable public homes? Yes! But there are also more expensive public resale flats along the way!
Note: Don't see an interesting transaction? I realised a particular SGD 1.73 million transaction that was reported in the media, but doesn't exist in this data set.
I overlapped a bar and line chart that tracks total public resale homes sold and the percentage of million dollar public homes over total public homes sold. Here, we see that while public resale home transactions have remained stable, percentage of million dollar public resale flats have increased sharply. As recent as 2020, million dollar public homes only make up less than 1% of all public homes sold. This percentage is easily 3-4% in recent months. While the percentage is relatively small, its growing trend is worrying.
This stacked bar chart shows the number of public home sales by price categories. I wanted a view to go beyond million dollar homes and focus on the overall market structure of our public housing market. We see growing number of public home sales in the range of SGD 500-800k, SGD 800K-1M and SGD less than 1M. There is also a shrinking number of public homes sold between SGD 300-500K, and barely any public homes that are sold at less than SGD 300K in recent months.
Finally, this chart is similar to the one above, but looks at percentages instead. This is to allow changes in proportions across different price categories to be more obvious. We see that expensive public home sales are forming a larger proportion of sales in the resale market. Similar to the trends above, the percentage of greater than 1 million dollar public homes is still quite small, but its growing trend is worrying to me. Similarly, there is a growing percentage of public home sales that are SGD 500K and above, and a declining percentage that are less than SGD 500K.